Bad news from my orthopedic surgeon, guys. He says I have FOMO. It stands for Fear of Missing Out. My orthopedic surgeon has a lot of opinions about my social life. And my left knee. But who the hell cares about being able to walk when everyone is hanging out without you?

It’s devastating. You think you’re invincible. “I’m young, I take care of myself,” you say. “I pay my tithe to multiple gymnasia. I get Retweeted on the regular. I keep it 100. It can’t happen to me.” I’m here to tell you that it can! FOMO is no respecter of persons, chile! It’ll get you. I appreciate your support. I’m setting up a GoFundMe but in the meantime you can just PayPal me directly.

This is a new epidemic. I’m here to raise awareness (and funds. See: PayPal, above). But if you’re over there suffering in silence, I’m here…

I celebrated a birthday recently. Not a major one. Turning this new age didn’t afford me any new privileges and the number it self doesn’t signify any major milestones. Nevertheless, it’s time to speculate wildly as to what the next 365 days will bring.

At some point during every birthday, some one always asks what I wish for in the new year. Somehow, I’m never prepared to answer it. Sure, I could say something generic like “world peace” or “good health for all.” But as a person with a penchant for the fantastical, I take these wishes seriously. (I may or may not still make a wish every day at 11:11.)

For the record, world peace and health are important and I want them. But this is my birthday wish. I don’t take this request to the birthday fairies or whatever wish granting creature you believe in lightly.

I’ve done it! I’VE DONE IT! I finally tricked my therapist into talking about Scandal with me! It has taken months of “emotional honesty” and “working on myself” and whatever to get to this point. Every week I pay her to talk about television for 45 minutes and every week she side-steps all of my clever observations about The Good Wife and thoughts on Modern Family (“I mean, do those people even like each other?”) and forces me to focus on “the issues.” As if anything is more important than Juliana Marguiles’ power suits and Christine Baranski’s reaction shots.

Diane Lockhart gives the Cliff Notes on 85% of my behavior.

But now I am triumphant! I was talking to her about a Scandal-watching party I had with a couple of friends and her eyes lit up. “Ooh, I love Scandal!” she cried. She immediately sat back in her chair and tried to wave it away with a return to professionalism (“But why do you keep buying yoga classes on Groupon if you’re never going to use them?”). I was like “Oh, no you don’t. I got you, Myrtle! Now, true or false: everyone’s hair on that show should receive billing as a Special Guest Star?”

Her name is not actually Myrtle but I can’t tell you what it really is. Doctor-patient confidentiality, y’know. I’m actually really serious about my relationship with my therapist. I respect it so much that she is literally the only person I’ve ever met who I have not stalked on Facebook. That’s respect, y’all. If I’ve met you even once, if you’re dating a friend of mine, if I overheard your name in line at Starbucks, I have looked at every photo of you on Facebook and felt envious of all the fun you had before we met. God, I waste a lot of time.

I’m a little sad that my breakthrough at therapy comes as our time together is coming to an end. We had our last session together yesterday morning. Because I’m cured!

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

Just kidding. She’s graduating. My therapist is actually a student. She’s in 5th grade. I help her with her algebra and she coaches me on managing my expectations and reasonable responses to normal situations (“The counter person at the bagel shop is probably not in love with you. But you could always ask him.” “I COULD NEVER DO THAT! YOU’RE CRAZY! Now what are your feelings about Mama Pope? Why is she always lying down? Does she have a bone density problem?!”). True story, two weeks ago she spent the whole session coaching me through writing a two-line text to a guy I have a crush on. When he responded I freaked out and called her emergency number. “WHAT DO I SAY? WHY WON’T YOU ANSWER ME?! I KNOW YOU’RE HOME; IT’S AFTER CURFEW!” Eventually I gave up and dialed 911. Those operators are really good at composing playful banter.

Anyway, I was telling my therapist about the Scandal party in service of a larger story that I thought she might find entertaining. I really see every session as a workshop for a new solo show. I spent our first month together trying to trick her into laughing with deadpan observations about my family and subtly racist humor. From 9 to 9:50 every Thursday I am Kevin Hart in a small, windowless room on JFK Boulevard. I pretend the noise-cancelling machine is applause. Killin’ it.

But it’s over now and I’m feeling a little bit sad about it, to be honest. She asked me to make a list of what I felt the important moments in our time together were and she did the same. This, of course, thrilled me because there’s NOTHING I love more than a flashback episode. And this was a flashback episode and a season finale! What’s that you say? This is therapy and not a television series? Oh yeah? Then why did Special Guest Star Chris Meloni show up? And why was “Feels Like I’m 17 Again” playing? (Well, that’s because I accidentally turned my iPhone on in my tote bag. But still!)

Anyway, it was all very emotional and I gave a speech at the end that I’m sure is a lock for an Emmy Award nomination. Watch your back, Tony Shaloub as “Monk”, I’m gunning for you! (I know that Monk is no longer on the air, but I’m pretty sure that Tony Shaloub wins Best Actor every year anyway because the world is a good and just place where order and good sense prevail.)

As if the end of my therapy sessions wasn’t traumatic enough, when I left home this morning I found a letter in the mail that I’d written to myself in January of 2013. I’d written it as part of my training with Artist’s U, a development program for emerging independent artists, and forgotten all of about it, as I do with literally everything I do at every moment of every day. I don’t even remember what the last sentence said. Anyway, sandwiches. What? Oh, the letter. Yes. I was terrified! There is nothing more cruel than to catch your reflection in the eyes of your past self. No matter how good things are going, how different things turned out to be, there’s always a bit of hope dashed, isn’t there? No? Just me. Whatever. Anyway, here’s actual footage of me opening my mailbox.

I still haven’t read it. I just can’t handle it. WHAT MIGHT IT SAY?! I’m like Brad Pitt at the end of Se7en, except instead of Gwyneth’s head I’m worried I might come face to face with my own hopes and dreams. And let me tell you, my ambitions are every bit as terrifying as the decapitated author of GOOP newsletters.

Anyway, this blog post isn’t about my anxiety (Oh, OKAY.) I’m not even that concerned about ending my therapy sessions. I mean, I have plenty of people to talk about Scandal with (and good coping mechanisms or access to pie or whatever). Like my friend Sean; he and I text about Scandal literally all day every day.

Sean is hilarious. I am constantly haranguing him to start a blog. Of course, then I would have to battle him like Highlander because I see every other funny person as a threat to my existence. One night we were live-texting during an episode of Scandal and I marveled at the pregnant Kerri Washington’s intensity during a particular scene; Sean fired back “She’s acting for two.”

I can’t really tell how it lands at a time when I’m not neck deep in madelines and caramel popcorn. But trust me, it was funny then. Ugh now I have all this anxiety that that example doesn’t adequately convey Sean’s hilarity. I mean, in context that joke made me spit out the piece of cupcake I keep lodged in my jaw (like tobacco chew but for people who are more health conscious). Out of context though… Man I don’t know. I mean, what IS comedy, anyway? I am seriously stressing about this. I simply don’t have time to page through a year’s worth of witty text banter to find a perfect example. I don’t have time! I have a day job! I am not caught up on Orphan Black! I have a meatloaf in the oven! I have a wedding to plan! And, no, I am not engaged but I have a plethora of good ideas and a Pinterest login. What else, really, does one need? Honestly, at this point I could get married with a month’s notice and someone else’s credit card. And it would be a ceremony that would blow your weave back. (Natural hair only at my wedding, please. Because Africa.)

The shade. (Click to enlarge. I don’t have time to bigify this.)

Sean and I have known each other since March of last year and I am consistently amazed by how well we get along because there’s a 14 year age gap between us. Most of the time I forget that and talk to him like he’s one of my hundreds and hundreds of late 20s gay friends. But, bless his heart, he is always kind enough to remind me. The other day we were talking about the OJ Simpson verdict (because we like to keep abreast of current events) and he said “the verdict came out on the day before my birthday. Like my birth canal birthday.”

We went to the same high school, separately of course. The Paleozoic era occurred in the interim. (Boom. Roasted.) It’s a phenomenal private school (pinkies up!) called The Park School outside Baltimore. I always say that when I have kids I’m moving back there just so my kids can go to Park too. That’s high praise considering I have a rather complicated relationship with Baltimore. Which is a ridiculous thing to say. I have a complicated relationship with a whole metropolis? That’s like those women who say they don’t get along with other women. “Really, Paula? You have a beef with over half the world’s population? What’s the common denominator there?”

Oh. The past. What is it and why does it happen all the time?

Speaking of: I got an invitation to my 15 year high school reunion the other day. That was a thing that happened. It had a picture of all of us on graduation day and I just stared at it forever. Look at these children! Look at these skinny shoulders! Look at these high-heeled sandals!!

I would show you the full picture but I don’t have permission to broadcast other people’s youthful visages across the Internet. Like I have permission to talk about all the jamooks I go on dates with. Whatever. Price of doing business.

I searched the crowd to find myself. I could remember taking the picture but I didn’t remember where I stood. What a weird feeling. As I passed over faces, I realized that I see a large majority of these people on Facebook all the time and yet this is how I remember them. And most of these embryos have babies now ! Look at that goofy face with the Nick Carter haircut! He’s got a baby! Look at the virgin who can’t drive: two babies!

Suddenly, there I was. Right in the center (R. Eric Thomas: Stealing focus since the late 90s). I didn’t even recognize that guy. I don’t who that is. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know why he did the things he did. But there he was, me, smiling brightly. It was like some shit out of The Shining. I exist in the past! But howwwww?

Not at all creepy.

15 years! It doesn’t feel long, it doesn’t feel short. I guess that’s why I’m sometimes surprised to remember that Sean and I are not the same age. I don’t feel like I think or act particularly young, but I’m in a state of extended exuberance.

There are times, though, when the chasm between us is enormous. For instance, he texted me that his college was doing a production of Steel Magnolias and I immediately texted back “YOU HAVE TO AUDITION! I DON’T CARE THAT THERE AREN’T ANY MALE PARTS! DO IT!” He replied, “I actually haven’t seen it but I felt like you’d think it was important because you’re always talking about it.” And it’s true, I am always talking about. Aren’t you? God, I have so much to teach him! There are young gay men roaming this Earth who haven’t seen Steel Magnolias! I don’t even know how they find the strength to get out of bed in the morning and pull on their skinny jorts.

It’s a funny thing, moving into the middle of the gay cultural inheritance: I get Judy Garland and Britney Spears, but neither of them had as profound an effect on me as they did on men 10 years older or 10 years younger than me, respectively. More importantly, as I get older, my perspective on the long history of LGBT men and women changes and I start to see the experiences of those who came before me as strikingly important to my own understanding of myself. I think sometimes of what it must have been like to be my age in 1981, the year I was born. I know men who recall with heart-breaking vividness what it felt like to watch all of their friends die. The thought of it is sometimes unbearable to me.

And so there are times, when I’m riffing with Sean, that the great book of the past opens up. And it’s not a bad thing; it feels a bit like being welcomed into a huge, bustling community.

Anyway, the way we came to meet was this: Park reached out to me about 18 months ago and asked me to write a play for a festival of new work by alumni.

It, legit, never occurred to me to write something that was appropriate for high school audiences. Instead, I wrote a farce about mistaken identity, rumors and scandal amidst a group of crazy people meeting on a street corner. All of the characters were me avatars, basically. There was one character who declared, apropos of very little, that she needed to eat every 15 minutes or she got demented. THAT IS A MEDICAL FACT ABOUT MY OWN LIFE.

Sean directed the play, a feat that still astounds me because 1) I am a crazy person who just types stuff that makes me giggle (see above) and 2) this 7-character circus was phenomenal! I was blown away. It was actually funny to other people. Plus, he and the cast (Matt, Jessie, Tony, Lizzie, Kelsey, Christopher and Katelyn–whom I think the world of and cannot praise highly enough) had added sight gags and details that I never would have thought of.

I went down to Baltimore for the festival last March. The school looks so much different than it did when I was there. The bones were the same but everything else had been built up and out, technologized and glassified (architecture!). I was to stay the night in the city because the next day I was doing a workshop called “Finding Comedy in Life: Performance and Panel”. If it were held today I’d ask them to change the name to “Living Your Life Like Lupita” followed by a breakout work session called “May Your Days Be Meryl and Bright”.

Between the matinee performance of the play and the evening show, the cast, directors and writers of all the festival plays gathered for dinner and a Q&A. I LOVE a Q&A because I have SO MANY opinions. “Well,” I said, “The first thing you want to do is date somebody older so they can take you to parties at their rich friends’ houses and you can get a feel for good interior design and a well-appointed mezze platter. But don’t fall in love with them. And don’t let them fall in love with you. You’re young. You have to sleep around.”

I’m available for Career Day if you need me.

We went through some great questions about what it was like to be a professional writer (all of which I answered “IDKLOL!”) and then they started asking about what Park was like when we, the alumni, had attended. At one point, a lovely young woman named Grace asked me what it was to be gay at Park in the 90s.

I was like, “The who-what? The when-where? The why-with-which? Oh no, honey. This is the most open place I’ve ever been but nobody was gay here then. The guy who played Jack on Will & Grace wasn’t even gay in the 90s.”

Es-ka-weeze?

I then went on to commend the gathered group of high schoolers, many of whom were miraculously out and happy and talking about exes (EXES?! PLURAL!) and starting Gay-Straight Alliances with pictures of Chris Colfer on the walls. I was amazed by them. I was inspired by them. I told them I wish that my 17-year-old self could’ve been so brave, so honest. I wished he could’ve seen it.

During dark times I used to wish that I had the power to time travel, just so I could go to the future and see how everything turned out. I just wanted to know that everything turned out okay. I like that inside the wish for time travel there is the belief that everything does, indeed, have a happy ending. I just couldn’t see it yet.

After dinner we all headed back to the theatre. As we walked along a corridor, we passed a huge wall of photographs from the 100 years of the school’s existence. And suddenly there I was. Right in the middle. I came face to face with a picture of me and Kim, Orlando, Aisha and Ama, sitting outside with the then-headmaster. We’re all no older than 15. We’re all grinning in puffy winter coats that I’m sure were neon, though the photo is black and white. There I was. On the wall of this new building in a place that used to know. Or at least there was a person who looked just like the person I see in old pictures of me.

I pointed it out to the kids from the play and kept walking.

I’m so glad that Grace asked the question she did because it pulled my experience now and my experience then into perspective. I’m the person that the kid in the picture would discover if he were to stumble on a time machine. I’m the man who would tell him how things turned out. And there have been times, more recently, when I thought about time travel and wished that I could go back and rescue that kid. I’d tell him he was loved, and he was whole and complete and he had the gift of honesty just waiting to free him.

But that smiling kid hanging on the walls of my high school is unchanging and he’s unreachable. I can’t rescue him; going back wouldn’t do either of us any good. The stranger in the picture needs me to keep moving forward, to keep evolving and expanding so that one day we might become the person we’re going to be. And so that’s what I’m going to do. For all of us.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a letter from myself that I need to read.

I’m in a fight with a boy. Actually, a lot of boys. Every boy. I’m in a fight with every boy.

You know how on The Mindy Project every week there’s a guy that she’s pining over or that she’s making a terrible mistake with and you think to yourself, That special guest star is quite attractive; I really hope that this time it sticks and then you think Is she just going to live happily ever after with him? He has a sitcom in the works at NBC. They can’t make him a series regular. And then you think, Maybe he’ll break his contract. This is love we’re talking about, people! And then you think Well, it’s like Meatloaf says, “I would do anything for love but I won’t break a multi-platform development deal.” But maybe… Andthen you think And then what? No more romantic hijinks. Just brunch on the weekends and summers in Vermont? and then you think Why Vermont? and you respond Because if Fitz and Olivia can’t end up there, by golly, somebody ought to and why not me? I mean Mindy. Mindy Lahiri. On The Mindy Project. Not me. But also me. God, I miss Scandal. And by that time the episode is winding down and, of course, the romance has fizzled out and Mindy is alone again with her life and her co-workers and her pratfalls. My life is just like that of late. Except whereas Mindy does it while traipsing around “New York” (a soundstage in Burbank), wearing fabulous clothes (the costume department is doing the damn thing, child), I do it all from from my bed over text messages while watching The Good Wife on Hulu.

I hate it. I hate dating! I hate it! I keep having these interactions where I go on a couple of dates with someone and then after a minute they come back at me angry because they say they’ve been throwing themselves at me and I haven’t responded.

ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF MY REACTION

Exsqueeze?

I gotta say, this trend has me totally flabbergoggled. You’re coming on to me and I’m not getting it? Objection, your honor. We’re not even Facebook friends. If you’re not even going to make the effort to stalk me, I don’t know what to tell you.

I mean, have you met me? I come on strong and I come on crazy. Always. I wrote a blog about a boy I had a crush on and then I sent it to him! MORE THAN ONCE. I proposed marriage to dreamboat Michael Liang at 20 til midnight in NYE. (Still no answer, but cross your fingers folks.) There’s no way you’re sending me messages that I’m not understanding, homes. You don’t need to throw yourself at me. All you need to do to express interest is pull a Sheryl Sandberg: lean in. I’m someone who takes even the slightest shift in posture as a declaration of eternal love. Clear your throat and adjust your tie and I’ll yelp “Yes I’ll marry you!”. Every time.

Look, I get it. Dating is hard. Being vulnerable is hard. Reading body language is hard. (THAT ‘S WHAT SHE SAID.) We’re both strangers sitting across from each other trying not to be strangers. But you know what? I’m one of those strangers too. It’s not the passiveness that gets me, it’s that these interactions make me feel inscrutable. I don’t think I can be with someone who doesn’t get me. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Anyway, to distract myself I’ve been throwing myself into work and into new projects and into supposedly fun things that I would never normally do.

And that’s how I ended up barefoot in a Northern Liberties warehouse with my hands clenched around a high schooler’s neck.

Hm. I should back up.

I’ve been thinking about joining the gay rugby team. Well, I’m not really sure if they’re gay. I mean, I know some of them are gay. But I don’t know if they’re officially gay or if it’s just like one of those casual gaynesses. You know, like Aaron Schock has. (POLITICS!) I’ve been interested in joining the rugby team for a while for two reasons:

1) I once watched about 10 minutes of rugby on television and I was really into it. I was totally following the rules and invested in the actual game (as opposed to literally anything else going on in the stadium up to and including the movement of the hot dog vendors up and down the stairs in the stands. Sometimes when I go to Phillies games I try to track one guy throughout the whole stadium. It’s like Where’s Waldo, but with weiners. Also, of course, how I describe most of my third dates.) Anyway, I was really taken by rugby. Until I remembered that I had no interest in sports and abruptly left the room.

2) Every picture I see of the rugby team looks like cuddling.

So I decided to join. I waited until I had insurance again before I gave the thought serious consideration because I know that there is a slight to definite possibility that I will break one or all of my limbs playing rugby. But I don’t like to dwell on that. I choose to focus, instead, on how much fun it’ll be to wear those little shorts and tussle with other chaps in the scrum (that’s what they call the cuddle huddle). It’s going to be fabulous.

Tryouts are in February. I’m thinking of singing a number from Once on This Island and doing a Tilda Swinton monologue from Michael Clayton. I’m a shoo-in.

I’m trying to find more interesting ways to get physically active. I can’t seem to get myself to go to the gym regularly. This is not my fault. I mean, I keep suggesting that the place would be full if they provided a continental breakfast and played romcoms on the TVs instead of all that basketball and news. I’ll get out of bed at 6 am for a bagel, schmear and a hilarious tale of mistaken identity and romance in a modern metropolis. But plodding along on an elliptical while striking the woman next to me with my expressive hand choreography to Beyonce’s new album? Not today, bitch.

I didn’t have a clue what to expect from this workshop. I have no stage combat experience whatsoever. I did, however, play Prince Hal in 11th grade (Yes, that’s where you remember me from. Please, no autographs.)

On my way over, I tried to imagine what lie in wait in this fake combat workshop. I figured I should get into character. Like most people, when I think of a character that fights I think of Oprah from The Color Purple. So, when I arrived, I stood in the center of the room, squared my shoulders and recited her speech to Miss Celie in the middle of the field.

“You told Harpo to beat me!” I bellowed to the crowd. “All my life I had to fight. Had to fight my daddy and my brothers, too. I loves Harpo, God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let beat me!” I stood back, triumphant, knowing that I’d successfully set the correct tone for this band of warriors. Everyone looked at me perplexed. White people.

So, I proceeded to explain the plot of The Color Purple to them. “Before Whoopi Goldberg was a singing nun, she was an unhappy woman married to the guy from Lethal Weapon. Not Mel Gibson. And Oprah was there. This is also before she turned psychic and met Patrick Swayze. This was in the dark ages. I’m talking the mid-80s.” I took the room through the whole movie and then decided that it’d be a nice exercise for the group to reenact the dinner scene where Ms. Sofia comes out of her catatonic state after being falsely imprisoned. Let me tell you, it took about 6 hours to prepare a full Sunday meal and fully commit to Oprah at her Orange is the New Blackest, but I think it was worth it. For art!

Oh! Brilliance alert! I think the plot of Sister Act 3 should involve Sister Mary Clarence’s long lost friend, Shug, who is on the run from her ne’er-do-well musician husband and just wants to settle down in a nice speakeasy on the San Francisco Bay. I volunteer to play Squeek. Guys! This is a legitimately ingenious idea. Can someone call Hollywood, please? I seem to have lost the number.

Anyway, once I ceded the floor to the leaders from Team Sunshine, the actual work began. It was, legit, beyond my wildest dreams. They worked us through a simple weight shifting exercise with a partner, showing us how to simulate grappling without actually hurting anyone. I was amazed at how quickly I broke a sweat simply pushing gently on a stranger. This sounds dirty. I’m uncomfortable. Next paragraph.

We did all manner of things in the interest of finding ways to compellingly and artistically represent the centerpiece battle in the play. We were organized into a modified rugby scrum (cuddle huddle) that moved in a slow spiral as we all tussled with each other (tickle fight). We we split into two sides and taught 16 poses to hold at various points during Hal and Hotspur’s epic showdown. It was like yoga with violence!

ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF ME DOING BATTLE

We learned how to simulate being knocked out of the way by a mace-weilding giant! We learned how to run in slow motion! Each day I left glowing with sweat, totally physically engaged and kind of amazed at what my body could do. Each morning after I woke up with that good muscular soreness that means you’re doing something right.

And so it was, on the third day, that I ended up in a grappling exercise, with my hands around the neck of a frail looking high schooler, thinking how glad I was to be out in the real world making human connections and sword fighting invisible people rather than doing battle with boys over text message.

Unbeknownst to me, my experience playing a small part in the creation of Team Sunshine’s new show would be the perfect preparation for my own new work. I’m putting together a new solo show. I don’t really want to talk too much about it yet, though.

FINE! I’ll tell you. (SO NOSEY!)

It’s called Vocab. It’s an instruction manual for the son I don’t yet have. It’s a series of questions about the nature of black masculinity posed by one who, by virtue of his status as a queer person, stands outside of it but is inextricably linked to it through his physicality. It’s about the many ways one can be seen as a black man and how those complicated perceptions relate to actual personhood.

Because I wanted to investigate something I feel outside of, I decided to use a vocabulary that is also outside of my home base, which is storytelling. Whereas previous solo shows have been based in a narrative, this one is based in physical action, in dance. There is still a narrative, but its arc is smaller and secondary to what will be done with the body. So I asked my friend George to choreograph for me. Specifically, to choreograph hip hop. GUYS I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK I’M DOING.

ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF ME TRYING TO GET BACK INTO MY COMFORT ZONE

We met for our first rehearsal yesterday. It was… an experience. George is such a fantastic dancer. And he seems to believe that I can actually learn these hard moves (Hard as in difficult and also as in Ghostface Killah.) We stood in front of a mirror in a dance studio while he just tossed off dance moves, demonstrated them and then commanded “Now you!”

ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF GEORGE KRUMPING

ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF MY REACTION

ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF ME KRUMPING

Standing next to George, looking at his body effortlessly jump into the moves and watching my body react like I had asked it to suddenly grow feathers I got discouraged. I look like a big lumbering idiot. I reminded myself that this was just day one. Surely Catherine Zeta-Jones felt the same way the first time she got in the studio to practice the Hot Honey Rag, I thought. Yes, that’s right, when I’m feeling down I compare myself to Catherine Zeta-Jones. Don’t you?

I’m not a natural dancer. Part of this show is also an exploration of that disconnect–do I have soul? Where is it? Why won’t it teach me to dougie?

ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF HOW I THINK I DANCE

ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF ME DANCING

It was tough. But I left rehearsal and I was glowing and sweating again. And while I was a bit less impressed by what my body could do than I was after the Team Sunshine rehearsal, I still felt more in touch with the physical, more capable, better versed in body language. I was on such a high that I actually went right to the gym afterwards and climbed on the treadmill. Full disclosure: part of this was self-preservation. The show also involves me sprinting in place while delivering a monologue and this bitch ain’t trying to die on stage.

So that was Day 1.

And it seems to me, day 1 is more than just the hardest day, it’s also the day that begins the journey. I like to believe that journey’s destination is freedom from perceptions of inadequacy and a full embrace of the process–whether that process is dating or performing or just living. And I’m in it to win it.

Oh, if life were made of moments, even now and then a bad one…

I have no idea what happened this year. I really don’t. I re-read all the entries in this blog earlier tonight and I thought, What? When did I do all this stuff? I went to an awards show? I got engaged to a doctor? Really! Also, I’m a complete lunatic. Why do I put this stuff on the internet?

Eh, whatever. I’m never going to be president.

That’s always my thought process when I have doubts about putting potentially embarrassing things on the Internet. Like, the litmus test for “Is this appropriate” is not “do you have any dignity whatsoever?” but rather “you planning on running a national campaign for the highest office in the land? No? Great, do whatever the hell you want! Talk about your therapist some more! Take a picture of your brunch! Work out your complicated feelings! Everything is correct! The NSA already knows about it anyway! Who’s hungry?”

So, anyway, here’s to more of that, I guess!

I’m bad at New Year’s Eve, I think. Ever since I was in the restaurant industry I’ve derisively referred to it as Amateur Night. It’s amazing the number of drunk girls I see stumbling about at 12:15 wearing no shoes and crying. We’re only 15 minutes into the new year, what could have possibly gone wrong?

Center City Philadelphia looks like a zombie apocalypse from around 11pm on New Year’s Eve until around 2 a.m. on January 2nd. Hide your kids, hide your wife, bring out your sparkly headdresses, find your vuvuzela, move your car from the spot in occupies in the middle of Broad Street all year round, disregard literally every law, kiss a stranger, litter with wild abandon! It’s a madhouse. And I tend to try to avoid it.

It’s not just the total collapse of society that I try to avoid, though. I’m not really a “New Year, New You” person. I don’t do resolutions. I don’t make myself promises for the next year. And I try not to take stock of the past year on New Year’s Eve. I like to look at life as moments–some closer, some farther–not controlled by time but rather the proximity of memory, the immediacy of emotion. I often find myself telling my therapist (oh look! He’s talking about his therapist again!) about something that happened in the past week and then switching seamlessly into a tale from years ago. Because in my mind there’s a connection, they’re all part of the same unfinished story. She seems to take this in stride. She takes everything in stride, which is impressive considering I usually just roll in there like Julia Roberts in the shopping montage from Pretty Woman, all weighed down with baggage and wearing a jaunty hat. “You agreed to help me parse my emotions? Big mistake. Huge.”

On my way to therapy! Thanks Obama!

Anyway, I decided that instead of retracing my steps or promising things I may or may not do in the following twelve months (show up on time, contribute to my 401k, go to the gym, somehow get a baby/boyfriend/tattoo), I would revisit 10 of my favorite moments from the 2013 in pictures. Continue reading →